I’ve been itching to rip into the folks at Zagat like an order of striped bass en papillote for years, and their snub of the East End in the annual grassroots ratings list for Long Island only fed that fire. I mean, what the heck do the customers of our restaurants know anyway, especially the ones that take the time to offer Zagat’s their two cents—which they probably took out of the waiter’s tip.
Well, thanks to the timing of weekly newspaper deadlines, The New York Times kinda beat me to the punch. Long Island dining columnist Robin Finn did a sort of revue-review of a predictable list of some of the East End’s heaviest culinary hitters: Della Femina, 1770 House, Harvest, Sen and the American Hotel. Since Mr. Sulzberger was picking up the tab and why not take along some folks, she took Wölffer Estate winemaker Roman Roth and his uber-sweet wife, Duchy, which was a clever idea, I thought—they certainly have refined palates and at the very least understand the business of preparing and serving comestibles.
And she also invited Dan Rattiner, who—as I can attest from having waited on him many times over the years—doesn’t know the first thing about food or the restaurant business and is swooningly in love with himself and his own opinions, and therefore a perfect choice, since he probably represents the vast majority of Zagat’s jurists.
You see, while Zagat is a good search engine, and bitingly clever in its summaries of readers’ comments about a restaurant, I’ve never met anyone who actually reads the Zagat ratings except industry types looking for their own names and people who couldn’t find a good restaurant on Spring Street without scouting reports. If you’re a foodie, you don’t need a bunch of people whose names and bona fides you don’t know telling you if a restaurant is good.
The problem with Zagat is twofold: First of all, it’s way too simplified. Voters only rate a restaurant’s food, service and atmosphere on a scale of one to three and then the Zagat people do some kind of mathematical thingy to come up with a number more like 20 to 25 for a “good” restaurant. So McDonald’s, at worst, is a one (it would actually probably average a lot higher since the service is pretty darn good there) and Le Bernardin is, at best, a three.
Strictly speaking, the law of averages tells us that unless a place is really abysmal it’s going to end up with a pretty high average rating, and it wouldn’t be very hard for a moderately good place to end up with a rating much better than it deserves if it has a loyal following.
The second, and more vexing problem, is that this gavel of culinary justice is wielded by an unknowledgeable and/or biased jury. The Zagat raters are not unlike a group of children in a schoolyard, easily swayed by favoritism and whims and prone to lashing out when they are personally scorned. Like many who write letters to the editor of a newspaper or speak out at a town council meeting, the people who offer their opinions to Zagat are, in large part, either those who have a very particular nit to pick with a restaurant or are its biggest cheerleaders. People who are fans of one particular restaurant, which may or may not be very good, will lavish praise on it along with heaping spoonfuls of “three” ratings.
And since any restaurant, particularly expensive ones, will have its enemies, there will be punches to the stomach of even the most superior establishment’s average. What you end up with when you have such a narrow rating system, then, is a pasta bowl of mediocrity in which the best of the best restaurants don’t have exceedingly high scores and some only average restaurants may have undeservedly high ones just because they are popular with a certain crowd.
Case in point: voters put Peter Luger’s in the top 10 restaurants on Long Island. And that’s not even the real Peter Luger’s, which is technically on Long Island, but the one in Great Neck, which is basically a banquet hall. Snore. It’s one of the world’s most famous steak houses and the most complex thing about the menu is choosing how many people the “steak” should be ordered for. The grouchy old men who are what really make the original Luger’s what it is would probably not even earn that bastion as high a rating.
Not that the ratings completely miss the mark. The North Fork Table and Inn certainly earned its spot at the top and Stone Creek Inn, Plaza Café and Vine Street are undoubtedly great top 20 picks all the way, and probably should be top 10. Since most of the others are well up the island, I’m not familiar with them, but it’s hard to believe, without sounding too East End snotty, that so few of the East End’s restaurants, some of which have achieved real splendor in the last several years, made the top 50.
Looking at some of those that did can give an idea of what the others we don’t know are like: Mirko’s, for example. Okay, I know, it’s very good, but the menu is a bore and its top-20 rating is a classic example of a popularity contest staged by a clutch of very regular regulars putting the cool kid at the head of the class. Robert’s, the coastal Italian place across the street, where the food is a little more refined but the service a little less fawning, was near the top in years past for the same reason.
I feel sort of the same way about Dave’s Grill. The food is very good and the staff super friendly, but I just don’t see it drawing a higher rating from a discerning clientele than Della Femina, 1770, or Oasis (none of which, criminally, made the top 50).
Ms. Finn and her troupe of convivial gastro-nobodies hit the American Hotel and Sen, both of which are fun places to go to dinner, but aren’t really in the elite. The American Hotel, maybe, for the service but not the food, not these days anyway. Nonetheless, I’m surprised it actually didn’t cut the Zagat mustard just because the Hotel’s type of high-falutin’ old-school luxury (and snootiness) seems like the sort of thing that would earn it popularity points.
If there was a category for tan skin and short skirts, the staff at Sen might earn a top billing, but the sashimi and service won’t. The Harvest was a good choice on Ms. Finn’s part: great food, great atmosphere, decent service. If it wasn’t so far out there it might have made it to the top rankings, since it is sort of a trendy choice for its oversize portions.
For my own personal tour of glaring omissions, I would have stopped at Yama Q, Beacon, Inn Spot on the Bay, Café Max and Wild Thyme. Then I would have gone to the North Fork Table and Inn, because it is the best.
All I have left to say is thank God that my favorite restaurant, [entry deleted], wasn’t on the Zagat list. It’s too crowded already.
More Posts from 
